Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/640

624 of the psychological method in ethics, and Professor Ladd takes occasion to repeat a rather surprising criticism which he had already made (pp. 106-107) on the Aristotelian distinction between intellectual and moral excellences. According to Professor Ladd, "no such distinction as that advanced by Aristotle can justify itself before the analysis of a thorough and consistent psychological ethics," and the arguments which Aristotle uses to justify it are mistaken. In regard to these special arguments, it is possible that something may have to be conceded; but if any kind of ethics proposes to set aside the distinction of scientific thinking and moral action, one can only say, so much the worse for that kind of ethics.

In proposing his classification of the virtues into Virtues of the Will, of the Judgment, and of Feeling, Professor Ladd is, of course, careful to explain that none of these faculties and none of the corresponding virtues can exist independently of the others, that in each case what is emphasized is the relative predominance of one of the three faculties over the other two, and finally that all three faculties and kinds of virtue are necessary for true or complete virtue. Nevertheless, with all these qualifications in view, I cannot but think that we have here one of the cases in which Professor Ladd's psychological method is totally inappropriate in ethics. It is a pity that he dismisses so easily the classification of virtues in relation to the objects upon which they terminate. I should have been inclined to think it almost obvious that the concrete virtues or duties could not possibly be defined except as the kinds of activity appropriate in given relations, and that expressions like "Virtues of the Will," etc., could denote only the more formal virtues or the elements implied in all virtue. That some virtues emphasize one of these elements more than another may in some sense be allowed ; but to adopt this difference of emphasis as a principle of classification ought, one would have thought, to have been impossible to one who had already refused to accept the similar, but much more obvious and concrete, division of the virtues into self-regarding and social.

In support of this criticism, it may suffice to advance three arguments drawn from Professor Ladd's subsequent discussion of the several virtues in accordance with his classification, (1) I find that in at least two cases (and there are probably others) virtues, nominally particular, are characterized in terms which mark them out as being clearly general or formal virtues (or, perhaps one should say, formal conditions of all particular virtues), and not on the same level as others grouped along with them. Constancy, says Professor Ladd, "is that